So over christmas holidays I spent about 5 days to perfect my raspberry pi based internet radio player. You’ll need the following hardware: Raspberry Pi model B USB Wifi dongle (something that works with Raspbian would be nice). I got this one (http://www.adafruit.com/products/1030) from Adafruit. SD card (I’m using a 16GB card, but I think 8GB should be good to start with) Bluetooth 4.0 dongle. I’m using this one from ASUS (http://www.asus.com/ca-en/Networking/USBBT400/) that seems to work fine in Linux/Raspbian PiTFT resistive touch screen assembled from Adafruit (http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601) Pack of 20 tactile buttons from Adafruit (http://www.adafruit.com/products/1489) for the above screen (You need to solder these in…..very simple) Appropriate power USB power supply. Again I’m using the one from Adafruit (http://www.adafruit.com/products/501) Standard A to micro-B USB cable (http://www.adafruit.com/products/592) (optional) PiTFT Enclosure from…

A little while ago our web developer asked me to look into proxmox containers and how we could take advantage of it to setup a development environment for him. The idea was to use the power of linux containers and enable him to develop fully functional/accessible sites in a private container. Here are the steps we will cover in this article: Install proxmox on a machine with a single public IP address Secure the machine with ufw to only allow connections from a specific IP address space Setup a admin user other than root for proxmox admin interface Setup proxmox to use the single IP address and the vmbridge for masquerading Setup two Linux Ubuntu 12.04 containers with private addresses and enable the to access the internet via the bridge…

I've finally got this project to a point were I can do a write up on it. The following hardware is needed: Raspberry Pi 512K version (or BeagleBone Black) Logitech C920 Webcam 16 GB micro SDHC card (can probably do it on 8GB too) Wireless dongle supported by linux (I'm using a TrendNet TEW-645UB which was pretty much plug and play) The goal of this project is to get the following installed and configured: CRTMP streaming server C920 install and config (v4l2), ffmpeg installation, boneCV installation from Derek Molloy's site configuring ddclient for dynamic DNS (optional) putting it all together and creating a webpage with embedded JWplayer to view the stream UPDATE: Sound works now on BeagleBone Black. On Raspberry you will run into alsa buffer xruns. See below for…

Here are some quick tip(s) for copying a ton of files between unixy machines really fast. You're probably thinking "why not use rsync?"…..well rsync can be miserably slow if your source or destination cpu is underpowered. You can always do a rsync after these commands to make 100% certain that everything checks out, but try using one of these methods for the initial copy: One way of doing it is tar -c /path/to/dir | ssh user@remote_server 'tar -xpvf - -C /absolute/path/to/remotedir' You'll be prompted for the remote servers password or you can use the private key of the remote server using the -i switch in the ssh command. This has the side benefit of preserving permissions. An alternate version of this command can also be used to locally move folder…

If you try to install Ubuntu 10.10 under parallels desktop 6.0 on OSX -- atleast as of the writing of this article -- you'll soon discover that although your entire installation is done in a high (eg: 1920x1080) resolution, as soon as the install is done and you reboot, your VM is stuck at 1024x768. You can install the parallel tools using the menu option and it still won't help -- although it helps with 3D (ie: compiz). Under Gnomes System/Preferences/Monitors the highest resolution available is 1024x768 :-(. After searching around the net for the past week or so and trying just about every remedy -- which did not work -- I was about to give up, then I found the magic command that "makes it go" :-). I've now…

If you've recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 and have installed Nvidia and/or ATI drivers -- or installed ubuntu under emulation -- you'll end up with a (butt) ugly splash screen. In my case under parallel 6.0 I ended up with a text boot screen that just read "Ubuntu 10.10"......Ughhh. Here is a quick tutorial on how to get a nice splash restored. This procedure also works in 10.04. Keep in mind that I'm doing everything with 1280x1024 screen size. your mileage might vary (ie: you might want 1024x768). You'll need to get a terminal session opened for this: Get the nice splash screen installed sudo apt-get install v86d Edit your grub config file and add the following sudo vi /etc/default/grub Look for this line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and replace it with this…

In this guide I'll show you how to stream live HDV/DV video to your iphone using a linux box (Ubuntu 9.10) with firewire input running vlc/ffmpeg and a Imac with OSX 10.6.2 running mediastreamsegmenter and apache2. Start out with the iPhone streaming media overview. Without understanding this document you'll have a hard time getting things working. First things first, you need to have a working Ubuntu 9.10 machine. I'm using a small footprint 2.4Ghz Core2Duo machine with PCI firewire 400 card in it. For video input I'm using a Canon HV30 set to HDV mode (1080i/60) connected via firewire. Next you need to follow the instructions on this page (steps 0-5) to get a working ffmpeg with x264 and aac encoding. Without this working you're not going anywhere....sorry. If you're…

For those of you who don't know OpenShot Video Editor(TM) is an open-source program that creates, modifies, and edits video files. OpenShot provides extensive editing and compositing features, and has been designed as a practical tool for working with high-definition video including HDV and AVCHD.Jonathan Thomas and crew have reached their 1.0 milestone (congrats :-)). The program is rock solid and is running beautifully on my Ubuntu 9.10 installation.OpenShot's Features include:Support for many video, audio, and image formats (based on FFmpeg)Gnome integration (drag and drop support)Multiple tracksClip resizing, trimming, snapping, and cuttingVideo transitions with real-time previewsCompositing, image overlays, watermarksTitle templates, title creationSVG friendly, to create and include titles and creditsScrolling motion picture creditsSolid color clips (including alpha compositing)Support for Rotoscoping / Image sequencesDrag and drop timelineFrame stepping, key-mappings: J,K, and…

I recently upgraded netbook using the distribution upgrade and didn't like the results, so I reinstalled Ubuntu Notebook Remix 9.10 Karmic Koala. Well, I'm sorry but I don't think this Koala was ready for release. First there was the issue of where the heck are all the beloved Ubuntu tools. Gone is the Add/Remove software progy (you have to install manually), now we have Ubuntu Software Centre. Gone is being able to check off multiple packages for batch install, USC installs apps one at a time (which takes two mouse clicks per app).To top it off -- atleast in UNR 9.10 -- there is no install button once you click on the arrow beside the packages. No, it's not a problem with root/admin, I tried running it as root and…

I've been using Synergy for about 3 years now and never really thought about writing about it. Tonight I came across Synergy+ which is a maintenance fork of the original Synergy. So I thought about writing a small note about it since it's now maintained again.Synergy+ (synergy-plus) lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, without special hardware. All you need is a LAN connection. It's intended for users with multiple computers, where each system uses its own display. It's a little like having a 2nd or a 3rd desktop. It's not a KVM or VNC tool, but it does achieve similar results (but with added convenience). No need to press any buttons when you want to change desktops, and your keyboard…